Casey Harris

Broadly, my research utilizes quantitative methods employed at the substantive intersection of stratification and crime. My work is theoretically informed by prominent sociological paradigms drawn from urban sociology, demography, immigrant assimilation, media framing, and the sociology of religion literatures. In particular, I identify four substantive areas into which my current and prospective research falls. First, my work examines the nexus of race/ethnicity and criminal offending, arrest, and victimization. I have currently published twelve papers within this substantive area, focusing on issues surrounding racial and ethnic disparities in violent offending and victimization as a function of differences in socio-structural characteristics. Much of this work leverages the racial invariance framework proposed by Land, McCall, and Cohen (1990), but expands this line of inquiry to the theoretical and methodological implications of a growing Latino population and changes to residential segregation over the past several decades. Most of these articles have appeared in mid- or top-tier criminology and sociology journals, though two have been published in Criminology, the top journal for the sociological study of crime. One of these manuscripts won the Outstanding Paper award from the American Society of Criminology in 2012 and the other was nominated for the same award in 2013. At the same time, I was awarded a National Institute of Justice grant in 2015 to study intra- and inter-racial violence during the Great Recession as part of my work in this area, and I am currently working on a number of additional manuscripts expanding it further, including several with colleagues and graduate students. Second, building off of my broader interest with race/ethnicity and crime, another area of my research examines the link between immigration and crime at the community-level. Dovetailing with my research on race and crime more broadly, this scholarship examines key sociological processes of segregation, assimilation, and community change amidst the newest waves of Latino/Hispanic and Asian foreign-born persons, in particular. I have published nine peer-reviewed manuscripts at mid- or top-tier sociology journals and have several additional articles under review or that will soon be submitted. Additionally, some of this work was supported by a National Institute of Justice grant focusing on religious participation among different immigrant groups funded in 2015. Relatedly, third, I have worked the past several years to build a unique project examining how both national and local media outlets frame the immigration-crime nexus over time and across different communities. Involving undergraduate and graduate students, this research has already resulted in two publications (along with several Masters theses) with an additional four papers under review or soon to be submitted. Major themes in this research include systematic changes over time to media narratives, the racialization of immigration-crime language, policy windows and the role played by major events in promoting specific narratives, publication contexts, and “claims makers” as part of public sociology. Finally, fourth, I have published at the intersection of religion, community, and crime by building off of the “moral communities” and civic engagement frameworks. In particular, this work addresses how specific types of religious organizations and their adherents differentially provide social control for some racial and ethnic groups but not others. For example, I have published on the historical Black church within the Black community, as well as the role of the Catholic Church within the immigration-crime dynamic. Some of my newer work in this area also examines different immigrant communities amidst diversification in residential settlement of the foreign born population, including the role played by religious contextual characteristics in shaping macro-level patterns of violent crime and suicide.